How to Know if Your Music is Done - PHH 005

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to today's show. Our show today is called how to tell if your music is done. For finding the finish line, this may be something that you have trouble with, and it might be something that you've been a little bit afraid to ask about. After all, it's something we don't seem to talk a lot about. We talk a lot about how to start a piece and the practice techniques that are required to polish it, and we talk about how to prepare for performing it. But what happens when your piece is done? Maybe you've performed it, what do you do with it now? Does it go in a review pile, and if so, how do you do that? Or does it do something else? Or what if you don't really want to review your piece, you just want to go on to something else? So what do you do with it? How do you know if it's done first of all? And what do you do with it when it is Both of those things are questions that I get asked a lot, and I'm happy to sort of dive into that today. I think it's an important topic for this reason.

It contributes more, more than anything else to our harp happiness, which is obviously what we're about here. Because if you have a sense of accomplishment, if you know where that finish line is and you can feel like you've crossed it, then you have a sense of pride in what you've done. You get to move forward. You can feel like you're making progress and you can feel.

Joy in your harp playing and in every step of your harp journey. It makes your practice easier, makes sharing your music more fun.

But if you're always left with that question, that question, that is, well, I don't know, did I finish it? Did I really do it, or did I just put it away? And how many of us have gotten to that point with a piece where we say, well, I'll just put it away?

That's not the kind of thing that really gives you that sense of pride, that sense of accomplishment. It sort of leaves you hanging a little bit, doesn't it? Feels like loose threads. So on today's show, I'm going to talk about how not to have those loose threads. Whether you're preparing a piece to play somewhere or you're just done with it and you want to put it away, there is a way that you can put it away without leaving those threads hanging. And that's what we're going to talk about today. But before we do that, I want to tell you that I have a very special masterclass coming up. In one week from today, it'll be June 28th, and the masterclass is called from fumbles to Fabulous. Build the technique you want in just 10 minutes a day. I know that sounds crazy, but if you know anything about me, you know that I love a system. A system for learning, a system for practice, a system for all those kinds of things. My harp playing and my harp teaching are full of systems that are designed to help you do what you want to do and do it faster, do it better, all those good things. So, yes, you can build a technique that you want in 10 minutes a day. I've got a system for that and I will show you how. So stay tuned. At the end of this episode, I'll give you all the details about how to join that masterclass. It's free. And I think that you will be so thrilled with this system for learning the technical and aspects that you absolutely need to know which ones you can ignore and truly how not to spend too much time working on your technique but still doing the work you need to do. It's could be a game changer for you and I really want to share that with you. So be sure to stick around to the end of the episode and I'll tell you how to join us. But right now, let's start talking about that finish line. I'd like to start today by talking about the three stages of learning. I referred to them in the introduction and I do refer to them often because this is how I like to help my students understand the process for moving through a piece of music. I've written about this. My ebook is called Kaleidoscope Practice. And in there I talk a lot about how to work with those three stages of learning. And I'll be happy to share the link to that with you in the show notes for this episode episode. But right now let me give you a brief overview of those three stages of learning. So the first stage I call first sight, and this is perhaps not actually sight reading, but it's that introduction stage to a piece. We all know that feeling when you pick up a piece and it's new, the page is pristine, you're looking at it, you're excited about learning a piece, and you're ready to dig in and get started. That's first sight. It is the shortest of the learning stages. And in first sight, your goal is to become acquainted with the piece itself, how it goes, what you're trying to accomplish in the piece, and to get sort of an overview of the notes and how, how the piece works. It's not a very in depth view that will come later, but it really is. Let's familiarize ourselves with the whole piece, beginning to end, see what waits for us. Let's take this sort of big picture view before we start diving in. So that's first sight. And of course there are specific practice techniques that are really useful for that. But that's a discussion for another day and you'll be able to find a lot about that in the ebook if you choose. Now, the second stage is the messy middle. I do not have to explain the messy middle to you because we all know what that is. That's diving into the fingering and the notes and the rhythms and the levers or the pedals and all the stuff that has to happen for our hands to get around the notes that are required in the right amount of time. This is where we start looking for the right notes, the wrong notes, the fingering that's going to be the most efficient, the doing all that kind of nitty gritty detail work. That's the messy middle. And boy, it does get messy. Now, this stage can last for a long time, but there's a messy middle trap. And it's a trap that's really important for you to understand in the concept, in the context rather of our discussion today. Think about the messy middle like a sandbar in the ocean. I know when I was a kid, we always spent part of our summer at Jersey Shore. And it was always an extra treat when we would get to the beach that day and find out that there was a sandbar, that if we waded out far enough, we could get to this wonderful shallow spot that looked like it was way far out. And we could be in the far out part of the ocean and still in shallow water. The problem, of course, with the sandbar is that you had to get out to it, and so you could wade for a little bit, but then you probably had to swim because there was this deep part that you had to go through before you could get to the sandbar. The messy middle is like that deep part. You have to swim in it, right? It takes some effort, sometimes a lot of effort, and it can take some time. But what happens to a lot of people is they get stuck in the messy middle. They keep floundering in the deep water, not realizing that if they keep moving through the deep water, there's shallow stuff on the other side, stuff that's much easier. That's where the third stage, the finish stage, lies. And it's important to get to the finish stage and not to get stuck in that messy middle. So the finish stage, I think people should start much earlier in the process than they do. I'd like to see the finish stage start when you have your piece about 80% correct. Now, I know that might make you nervous, thinking that you still have a lot to correct, but if your piece is 80% correct 80% of the time, then you can start finishing it. And let me tell you what I mean by the finish stage. It's not the deadline, the finish line, the cutoff point. It is a stage, and it's where you begin to think about the piece again and in that big picture, the way you did at the beginning. And you think about it as a wholeness, an entire piece of music. You get your head out of the details, stop swimming in that deep water, and look at that big picture again. Create the continuity, create the expression, create all the musicality that you want, and let the rest of those details work themselves out in that process. So if you start by understanding that finish is a stage, then we can start talking about what to do when you get through that. So having gotten a little bit of our terminology straightened out, let me talk to you about the next part of the problem. When it comes to finishing your pieces.

There is no finish line. Well, you know what I mean. Music is objective, right?

What does done mean? I don't know. Because it's not like a piece of art that we can just hang on the wall or something. We can take a picture of and say, look, it's done. Music is a creation of the moment. So while we need, for our own sakes, to establish what done means, there is no One standard. But consider what done or finished might mean for you.

Does it mean that you have to have performed the piece and then it's done? Maybe it means you have to have it memorized. Maybe it means you just have to have it okay to play for yourself at home.

Any of those definitions is fine. And there may be hundreds more definitions. What's important is your personal definition of done. That's what's going to allow you to feel that you have checked the box.

What you need to remember is that your feeling about it is what's important. You know what it's like when you have that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that, oh, well, yeah, I worked on that and it got pretty good. But then I just put it away.

Those are those loose threads I was talking about earlier. We don't want to have those. We want to have the feeling of accomplishment that says, yeah, yeah, I learned that. I haven't played it in a while. I should take that out and look at it again. But yeah, I learned that. Well, what does learned that, you know, what does learned mean to you?

What is important is that whatever the standard you set for yourself is one that allows you to feel that sense of achievement, that sense of accomplishment, so that you don't have to say, well, yeah, I. I looked, I worked on that for a while, and then I just put it away. That's one of those sad phrases. Now, in a minute, I'm going to show you how to turn that around into a very positive phrase for yourself. But to think about having just to put away that piece because you never got it to. Whatever your personal level of finished is, I urge you to really consider this carefully. What is important to you in finishing a piece. Please don't use anybody else's standard. Don't think that you have to have performed a piece in order to put it away to call it finished. If that's not important to you, you have to set your own finish line. Now, I'm going to give you a few examples of how to do that and where your finish line might be. But I would like you to really consider this for yourself because the way you feel about your heart playing is what's important. Now let's get on to some finish line possibilities.

Where is your finish line? Well, let's see if we can try to find it. First of all, if you're picturing a race and you're running the race, picture the finish stage as that last lap of the track, right? That's pretty good. We know that that last lap of the track means that we're getting close to where we want to be. And because we're playing music and not running a race, we know that the finish line is, isn't going to be the same for everyone and that we get to decide where our finish line is. So I'm going to give you some possibilities for, in fact, for ways you might consider your piece to be finished and then what that last lap might look like as you approach your finish line. Okay, you have your track shoes on. All right, here we go. So option number one, this is perhaps the clearest one, and I call it polish and perform.

So you are playing a piece and you want to get it ready to perform somewhere. Maybe it's on a recital, maybe it's for a group of friends, maybe it's at a local nursing home. Wherever it is, you're going to perform it. And so you have a date which is an actual deadline. And isn't that kind of nice to have? I was like, okay, good, you know, September 1st, I'm going to play this piece. So that gives you a built in time frame, which is really helpful. And you know, you have to have it ready to perform. So that will perhaps be memorized, perhaps not. That's up to you. You get to decide that. Isn't it nice? Some of this is in your control, but in order to prepare something to perform it, you're going to be doing a lot of playing as you prepare it, right? You're going to get out of the messy middle, stop working on those details and start playing it, which is an essential part of the finished stage of that last lap. So you're going to be playing it, you're going to be doing previews. Because anytime you're going to perform a piece, don't make that the first time you've ever played it for somebody. Give yourself some low stakes previews. You could record your piece and just, you know, use that as a preview. You could play it for your pet. You could phone a friend and you know, play it for one friend. Play it for a group in the My Heart Mastery community. Those of you who are a members, you know that we have sounding boards which are exactly that. A small group of harp friends that get together and play music for, for each other. A great testing ground. And that's what those previews are. They're a way for you to sort of get the, get the kinks out of it. Find those unexpected problems that might crop up, you know, those little, oh, little pothole moments. Right. You didn't know that. You didn't know that thing. So there. It's a way to test that. So the previews are important for that. Then as you keep playing it, you're going to be noticing new details. Those. Those things that you didn't notice were so busy trying to get every note right. But now that you're thinking big picture again, you can see some of the patterns that maybe were eluding you when you were just looking at the trees instead of the forest. So, you know, you'll be deepening your familiarity with the piece. You'll be gaining comfort playing it for others. And that's very simply polish and perform. Then once that performance happens, you might want to figure out one of these next three options for that piece as well. It might stay as part of your permanent repertoire, in which case you'll keep reviewing it, but it might be something that is a once and done for you. So polish and perform is just our first option for finishing your piece. For placing that finish line, let's look at the second one. Option two is often referred to as just. Just I'll keep it in my fingers. So this is for a piece that you have learned, you've put your time in on it, and it's certainly in the finish stage, you're polishing it up and you intend to play it perhaps often, perhaps regularly, you want to be able to. To maybe just play it for yourself when you feel like it. So you want to keep it in your fingers so it doesn't get rusty, so you don't lose all the good work you've done on it. So the key part of keeping it in your fingers is to do regular review. And this would mean playing it once a week, perhaps, maybe more if it's closer to. To new in the finished stage. Right. As you go through the final lap with a piece that you're going to just keep in your fingers, you're going to be doing the playing and the big picture work that you would do if you were going to polish it for a performance. And you'll do some test runs, maybe, you know, maybe record it and see if it's really getting to that polished stage you like, or to just play it for a friend, just to keep it, you know, sort of performance ready. And you'll review it maybe twice a week at first, maybe then once a week, maybe as time goes by, you'll just review it once a month, but that'll be enough to keep it in your fingers so that you can play it when you Want. Now, this is really a lovely option for a piece that you really enjoy playing. Because who wants to have, you know, put in all that time learning a piece and then have it slip away? And you think, oh, I used to love that piece and now I have to sort of go back to ground zero. Well, you won't really go back to ground zero when you started again, but it would be nicer to have that piece as sort of part of your permanent repertoire. Doesn't that sound nice to think about having a permanent repertoire? So there's keep it in your fingers option three. Option three is to save it for later. Okay, save it for later is sort of a dubious category. And it's one of those things where, okay, you finished the piece, you're not sure that you want to play it again. You might someday, but you don't have a particular thing you want to play it for. It's not something you necessarily want to keep reviewing. Maybe you're just tired of it, but, you know, you're. Whatever it is, you're ready to move on to something else. So we are actually going to save it for later. And you know what? This is a finish line. This is different from loose threads because you're going to decide about it. And there are a couple key things that you're doing. Last lap will include if your piece is going in the save it for later pile. First of all, since we think we will come back to this piece someday, take just a moment before you save it for later and mark some of those spots that you expect you will need to do some extra practice work on when you come back to it. Like, oh, yeah, that part in the middle of page two. Those four bars, I'm going to need to remember. So just mark them. I often put a little indication at the top of the first page of a piece of music, you know, these measures and these measures and these measures and these measures. So that when I take out a piece to review it, I know instantly where those really tricky spots are. And I can start with those. Gives me sort of a heads up and a, you know, a speedway to practice it when I bring it back out. So mark those so that you have them. Then take the piece of music and put it in a separate save for later, you know, or revisit someday kind of drawer or a pile. You could have a separate box if you like, for music that you intend to revisit at some point, but you're putting it away for later. Maybe it's just a list that you keep. You Know, if you have your music on. On an iPad or something, you might make that a set list, a revisit or a save for later list where you're putting it away with purpose. On purpose, because you've chosen to, right? You don't feel like keeping it in your fingers. You're not going to perform it, but you're done with it. Okay, no loose threads here. You've made your decision and you're going to put it away. At least for now. You can always come back. The danger with this, of course, is that you end up doing that with too many pieces and you don't have anything that you can keep in your fingers or anything that you have in your fingers to play. We should always have something that we can play just because it feels good, right? So be sure you're not saving everything for later. That's not a good practice, but it is a legitimate action step and a perfectly worthy finish line. We can't keep every piece we've ever known in our fingers, so save some for later. And there's a fourth option. I call this one put away with pride. Remember I told you that I was going to help you revisit that put it away syndrome? That, that put it away feeling that just makes you kind of hunch over and be asham that, oh, I just put it away. Well, that's not how we're looking at put it away. We have some things that we're performing, some things that we're going to keep in our fingers, some things that we are just saving for later, but putting it away with pride. The point here is that we're going to create a really positive sense of completion. This would be for pieces that you've worked hard on, or maybe for pieces that are really long, or maybe for pieces that you've worked really hard on but you didn't particularly like. You have no specific plans to play it, but you want to still call it done. You know, this is not even perhaps as positive as save it for later, right? You know, maybe you learned that 12 page piece and you're like, whew, I did it. I don't know that I want to perform it because it would be a, you know, a feat that I'm not ready to. To attempt at this point. I don't have a place to play it. I don't want to keep it in my fingers, but I learned it and I'm really ready to put it away.

You're allowed to do that. You don't have to plan to revisit it. Because if you really aren't going to revisit it someday, then putting it in that revisit, save for later pile is going to make you feel like you haven't really finished it, like you haven't been able to call it done and check the box.

So if you're going to put it away with pride, you actually get to put it away. File it, put it in that drawer, let it gather dust. That's okay until you're ready. Maybe at some point you will decide to get it back out and brush it up and. And maybe you will have a place that you want to perform it, or maybe you'll want to bring it back to review status. Who knows? But for right now, you're just going to put it away. You don't have plans to continue with it. You are just ready to move on. So your final lap, if for this option is going to look like this, Go ahead, start, you know, polishing it the way you would in the finish stage. You're thinking big picture. You're playing it. You're putting all that expression into it. You're learning to, you know, play the entire piece, but give yourself a time frame and say, all right, I'm going to do this for two weeks. I'm going to do this for four weeks. I'm going to do this for one week, whatever feels right to you. For that piece, give yourself a time frame, right? You don't have a performance date for this, so you're going to have to create that due date, give yourself the finish line date, and then by that finish line date, you have to either record it or to share it with someone. Like, play it for a friend, play it for a teacher, play it for a pet. You don't have to perform it. I'd love it if you recorded it. You don't have to watch the recording, but you've got that great archival moment right. If you've just finished the Foray Impromptu and you never, you know, it was, you know, it took you two years and you never expect to play it again, but you, you know, you did it. Record that sucker, right? Get that on video or on audio, if that's what you want, so that a year from now you can go back and say, yeah, I did it. You've got proof, you know it. So you don't have to watch it now, but, you know, treat that as the certificate on the wall that says, yes, check the box. I finished it, I've put it away, but I am putting it away with pride. Then what I like to think of is you can file it with freedom. You file it at the back of the cabinet, the bottom of the drawer, the depths of the stack. File it in that round file if you really want. But wherever you file it, you can file it with freedom because you finished it on your terms, in your own way. Now there are the four options that I've identified for places to put your finish line for any given piece. Remember that each piece will have its own finish line, right? You're not going to use the same finish line for every piece you play. But let me share with you how you can take these same concepts and put them into place in your practice today. I hope by now you know that I'm all about taking action right? Harp playing, like any other endeavor, isn't just cerebral. It isn't all planning and creativity and expression. Although all of those play a role. But you have to do it right. Heart playing is not something that we just think about, it's something that we do. So it's all about action. Now, very quickly, let's recap what we talked about and then I'll tell you exactly what I think your first action step should be. Remember, we talked about the three learning stages. First sight, Messy middle, and finish stage. And be sure to check the show notes if you want to read more about those in my ebook. So those three stages, first sight, the initial excitement of a piece, messy middle, working on all the details, getting those, the nitty gritty in place. And then finish that elusive stage where we start turning those details into music. Then we talked about how to determine what that finish stage will look like, depending on what your finish line for that piece is going to look like. We also talked about deciding what your personal criteria are for finishing a piece. For calling a piece done, does it have to be memorized? Does it have to be performed? Does it just have to be okay to play for yourself or something else entirely? You decide. But please decide on what finishing a piece looks like. Realizing that you can put that finish line in a different place for different pieces that you're working on. And we talked about four different options for finish lines. Not that they're the only ones, but they certainly are going to cover most of the situations. Option one being polish and perform. Option two being keep it in your fingers. Option three saving it for later. And option four putting it away with pride. Now here's my thought. I think the most difficult of all of these options is putting it away with pride. I think that that's one that we could all use a little bit of practice with the idea that it's okay to let go. We harpists are known to be overachievers. Some of us have issues with perfectionism. And in fact, perfectionism and finishing and performance are often.

Problems or challenges that go hand in hand. So I think I'll link to a blog post that will tell you a little bit more about that, too. So check that one out in the show notes if you're. If that sounds like you. So I think putting it away with pride is something we can use a little bit more practice in. So this is what I would encourage you to do. Look at the pieces that you're working on right now and see if one of those might fall into that put it away kind of category where you're going to finish it, but you don't necessarily want to keep it hanging around. You don't necessarily think you want to revisit it. You're just going to finish it and then put it away and move on. And I want you to create your system for putting it away with pride. Decide what your time frame is going to be, how much longer are you going to spend on this piece, and then be sure that at the end of that time, you have set a date to either share it with someone or to record it for yourself.

Then get that done and put the piece away. Check the box. You've crossed the finish line and you can give yourself a pat on the back.

Because you've accomplished it.

That's part of achieving harp happiness, right? It's that feeling that we get from playing music, learning music, and being able to express ourselves on the harp. It's not necessarily how many pieces we can play or how perfectly we can play them. It's that the pieces we work on, we cross the finish line with in whatever way we choose.

This is your opportunity to create your harp happiness, and I hope that you do it. Now, I promised you early on that I would tell you a little bit more about my free masterclass, which is another important tool for creating your own harp happiness. If your technique is stopping you from playing the music that you want to play, and it might be in some rather sneaky ways, but you're not the type who likes to spend hours working on exercises or working through big exercise books because you have music you'd rather be playing, then this is the masterclass for you. It's called From Fumbles to Fabulous how to build the technique you want in just 10 minutes a day. Yes, I can do it. Your harp Systems Ninja here is going to give you the steps to be able to do that, to not spend more time than you want or more time than you should practicing your technique when we all know our practice time is limited and we really want to be able to play music. That's the point of harp playing, after all, right? To play music. But your technique has to enable that. So we have to do technique work. I have come across students who don't do any technique work because they don't have time or they don't do very much technique work because they think it's boring and that it's going to involve really deadly exercises and drills. No, no, no. Doesn't have to be that way at all. I've also run into students who spend way too much time working on technique and never get to their pieces. And then I've spent people who. I've seen students rather, who have a good balance between their technical work and their pieces, but they don't know how to push that technique work forward so that it helps them play the pieces they want. After all, your technique work should help you play your music, not be a thing apart from that. And there's a way to do that. And it doesn't have to take very much time, but it does have to encompass a few key things. And that's what I'll be talking about on the masterclass. I will give you the system hands down, it's free. I'd love for you to join me. The link is in the notes for this episode. You will find it easily. And once again, it's free. It is a week from the date that this episode is going live, so it'll be June 28th. And I would love for you to join me once again. Another way to help you create harp happiness. So you have your action step for today as far as choosing a piece and establishing its Put it away with pride system. And then do sign up for the masterclass next week. I will be coming back to you right here to talk about minor keys. Minor keys do not have to be a mystery. And in fact, if once you understand minor keys, it can help you read your music faster, learn it faster, and just, you know, maybe improvise more and enjoy what you're playing more. And there are. I'll just give you a little teaser here. There are four numbers that we're going to be talking about with minor keys, and the four numbers are.

3, 5, 6, and 7. Now, I hope those numbers have peaked your interest because they're the numbers that are important. In our discussion about minor keys, and I look forward to seeing you next week and I'll tell you all about them then. In the meantime, have a wonderful Harp Happy week. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp happiness every day. See you next time.